Another Signal from Trump
Not ordering the flags at executive buildings to half-staff.
Via the NYT: Trump has not lowered flags in honor of an officer who died from injuries sustained amid the riot.
President Trump has not ordered the flags on federal buildings to fly at half-staff in honor of Brian D. Sicknick, a police officer who was killed after trying to fend off pro-Trump loyalists during the siege at the Capitol on Wednesday.
While the flags at the Capitol have been lowered, Mr. Trump has not issued a similar order for federal buildings under his control. A White House spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
At best this is Trump’s utter self-absorption. At worst it is a signal that he does not see anything wrong with what happened on Wednesday as well as a further signal to those who perpetrated numerous crimes of his “love.”
One thing is for certain, it is yet another example, albeit a symbolic one, of the utter dereliction of his duties as President of the United States.
A law enforcement officer defending the US Capitol was killed by a mob, and the President of the United States can’t be bothered to have flags lowered.
Further, he has not called the family to express condolences to the family.
Mr. Trump has not reached out to Mr. Sicknick’s family, although Vice President Mike Pence called to offer condolences, an aide to Mr. Pence said.
Mr. Sicknick was attacked by insurrectionists with a fire extinguisher:
Mr. Sicknick, 42, an officer for the Capitol Police, died on Thursday from brain injuries he sustained after Trump loyalists who overtook the complex struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials.
Any other president, of any party or era, would have commented on this tragic outcome by now.
I would also recommend the full write-up on Mr. Sicknick from the NYT: He Dreamed of Being a Police Officer, Then Was Killed by a Pro-Trump Mob.
Also worth noting that by all accounts the President had not contacted the Vice President since before the roots. In fact, rather than checking on the Vice President and his Family, who were in lockdown with him, the President was calling senators to whip up voters.
Also another Capitol police force member has died this weekend by suicide. I sadly suspect that when details come out trauma related to Wednesday may have been the precipitating factor.
@mattbernius:
Trump hasn’t spoken to Pence since Wednesday.
According to Olivia Nuzzi in NYMag, Trump was disgusted by the rioters because they looked so “low class.” These fools will never understand that he despises them, mostly because they remind him of what he’s spent his life desperately trying and failing to escape–that he’s just a punk from Queens.
Americans can say “Black Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter” but it’s obvious Trump thinks No Lives Matter.
@mattbernius: The Pence situation, which I talked about in part in my post yesterday about Trump deserving to be impeached, is one that is remarkable and that I think we don’t have the full story yet.
It intersects, too, with reports that Pence authorized the National Guard to act, not Trump.
The whole situation is, quite frankly, insane.
@mattbernius: @Steven L. Taylor: Apparently the last time Trump and Pence spoke, it did…not go well.
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1348325061602676736?s=20
@Mikey: For once, Trump said something I agree with. Although for Pence’s behavior the last four years, not for last week.
@Mikey: Nonsense. Some live matter even to Trump–Trump lives matter. But only 2 or 3, four at the most. Maybe only one when push come to shove, but not *no lives*.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Well, himself, obviously. And certainly Ivanka, although Jared’s a definite no.
I’m not sold on the rest, though. Melania, Jr., and Eric are a maybe. I’m sure Tiffany and Barron barely register.
@mattbernius:
It was confirmed that the second officer was deployed on Wednesday as part of the response to the riot. Given what we know about trauma and PTSD, there is a strong possibility of not just correlation but causation here.
@mattbernius:
Don’t overlook the possibility that the officer was complicit in some way.
@CSK:
Frankly, that’s an insult to all the Queens’ punks. C’mon, you know that’s true. The punks would have shaken him down for his lunch money.
@Mikey:
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Cracker had it right – in his head, the phrase is MY life matters. Everyone else, to the extent they exist at all, is just a loser.
@Michael Reynolds: “Don’t overlook the possibility that the officer was complicit in some way.”
I get that it’s a possibility, but it’s such a horrible accusation with such a horrible outcome that I choose not to go there unless there is some evidence.
@Michael Reynolds: Out of respect for the dead and the clear lack of facts, let’s not immediately go down a Vince Foster or Seth Rich path.
@mattbernius:
Oh FFS, @Matt. It’s OK to speculate with no evidence that he was broken by PTSD but not suggest the possibility that he might be complicit? You go from that to Vince Foster?
vs.
His father was a financial contributor to right-wing Republicans as well as donating to a tobacco PAC. Does that prove anything? No, obviously not. Or, I should say there’s the same level of evidence that exists for a “strong possibility” of a PTSD diagnosis. But instantly leaping to the conclusion that he was mentally ill is cool. Because? Because that’s how PTSD works, you have a bad day and go home and off yourself? Oh, OK. Out of respect for the dead let’s just assume he had the whole array of common PTSD preconditions – abuse, drug use, depression.
@Michael Reynolds:
Are you Donald Trump’s sock puppet by any chance? Your lack of any sense of human decency sounds a lot like him.
@mattbernius:
And this:
I miss Trump already. He was the best president we’ve ever had. I would be mad the thieves stole something from me as well. In four more years we get him back though. Just hope socialism including the new global paycheck program already underway in the US doesn’t destroy us by then. Why are you people do angry and where does it come from? Trump made America great! Dems wanted it destroyed and got it.
@Mikey: My take was the three potential others were Ivanka, Barron, and Jr. in descending order of importance.
Probably an oversight. Trump is a narcissist and narcissists under pressure typically become all but utterly self-absorbed. The current situation reminds of the mind-blowing chapters in Zumwalt’s autobiography “On Watch” about the Yom Kippur War, when Kissinger and the Joint Chiefs had to manage the crisis on their own..as Nixon was out of touch and probably out of commission drowning his Watergate sorrows in Florida. It’s easy to imagine Trump in a similar state.
The PGA is about to yank events from Trump courses. This news has surely reached him, and it brings an awareness his Trump brand is on the block. His credit rating with the Big Boys probably has a minus in front of it, as it’s a fair bet those Big Boys aren’t optimistic that anyone or anything can refurbish that reputation. He’s been in the game a long time, he knows what they will do: Start seizing assets.
His house of cards is staring at at a hurricane.
@Michael Reynolds:
Michael, pace, your right, I shouldn’t be doing diagnosis on limited facts either.
I will try to speak from experience. Based on now a year plus of going through a training around trauma and trauma-informed care methodologies (for professional reasons)–including a reading of case studies of the aftermath of these situations–I can state that trauma is documented to, for some, begin to manifest shortly after an event.
For others, it can remain buried for years.
You are correct that for a DSM compliant diagnosis of PTSD there is a larger passage of time then what we’ve had. I ALSO failed to also note that there is a parallel condition called “Acute stress disorder*” that is also tied to direct trauma experience (it’s detailed further down on the page you linked to) where symptoms can manifest within as few as 3 days from the inciting incident. It’s correlated with a 10x rate of suicidal completion: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20624822/
But, again, we don’t have the details to diagnose at this point.
[* – I should have also listed that as an option in my original post, but wasn’t paying enough attention and collapsed the two into just PTSD]
Either way, this guard aside, I hope that all victims of the riot are getting the overall mental and emotional health care they need in order to begin the process in healthy ways the amount of trauma they experienced and the toll it may be having on them.
@Mikey: I hate to tell ya Mikey, but what we’re in for now, is going to be worse than anything Trump ever did. You think Comunism is fun- just wait & see. Trump did everything he could for the people-the Dems are only out for themselves! America, as we know it, was lost last Wednesday.
@mattbernius:
This was me post-Desert Storm. Fortunately I was one of those for whom it did not proceed to PTSD. But for a few months it was tough at times. And I quit playing music–I was in a band and I just avoided it after I returned home. Now I wish I hadn’t, but at the time I just didn’t want to be around a lot of people.
@Mikey:
Glad to hear you got through it!
I honestly don’t think about it much because my focus is so much more on ensuring people I work with done experience retraumatization during the research and design process (and triaging it when they do). Typically the major traumas they experienced happened further in the past.
Unfortunately with trauma, the past is always dangerously close to the present.
There is every chance that Trump’s cowardice is sparing this family further grief.
@flat earth luddite:
My apologies. I should have referred to Trump as “a bankrupt casino operator from Queens.”
@Gustopher:
Would YOU want this slug offering his phony condolences? I’d tell him to drop dead and slam the phone down in his ear.
Look, I really need to get something out @Michael Reynolds —
The reasons that I jumped to the Acute Stress Disorder (which admittedly I lumped in with PTSD incorrectly) is that it is exactly what *can* happen with ASD (especially in case where there may be other underlying conditions). And the reason that had been on my mind was that a number of survivors of the siege are already self-reporting symptoms that *could* (again internet diagnosis) be trauma related. Earlier today Igor Bobic shared the following:
There have been similar tweets from other reporters and hill staffers. I see no reason for police not to be experiencing that as well ( I actually expect this will get worse for folks upon their return to the Capitol this week (with a high chance of retraumatization). This isn’t to say that its ASD, there need to be a number of co-occurring symptoms, but they are at a higher risk due to the nature of what they have been through.
Beyond that, suggesting the possibility of acute mental and emotional harm, after this type of event, wasn’t at all intended to suggest there is anything wrong at all with suffering from ASD in the wake of a traumatic event–no more than noting concern about the realities (and high chance of) of serious physical trauma in the wake of, say, a bad car accident*. Neither should be taken as a normative judgment or some critique of the individual in question.
Again, I was putting 1 and 1 together without all the facts. And not as a medical professional. But hopefully, this unpacks a little more of my thinking.
* – also I write that as someone who deals with some recurring mental illness issues on the reg.
Someone in the WH finally got around to ordering that flags be flown at half-staff. I doubt it was Trump. His name is typed at the bottom of the proclamation, not signed.
@CSK: How about all the suicide victims there will be when the democrats get full reighn of power and wipe out all the jobs by giving it all to China and raise our taxes so high that we can’t afford to pay our bills. Trump like him or hate him everyone has got to admit the best for our country was.on his mind and agenda!
@Ryan & @June Vendetti: These have to be parodies, right? And the beyond tired socialist/communist accusations…conservatives, and those who parody them, really need to come up with some new material…
@An Interested Party: I always feel kinda weirded out when they find us…..like, who the fuck gave them the secret password?! 😉
@June Vendetti: So true. Trump has always been a great patriot! Like when he said that Americans who served in Vietnam were “suckers” and “losers.” And dont forget when Putin issued a bounty for the lives of American serviceman in Afghanistan. Trump said nothing and did nothing.
@June Vendetti:
380,000 would beg to differ, were they still alive. But they’re dead, because Trump did nothing for them. They were inconvenient because they made him look bad.
@Jax: For some reason this post has garnered a lot of attention (that much I can tell via the backend of the site), which means it must be linked somewhere, but I am not sure where. I thought we had some tools to reveal such things, but I can’t find them.
Indeed, it is weirdly the most viewed post on the site in the last 30 days.
@Steven L. Taylor: I thought maybe it had been linked on Memeorandum, but I don’t see it anywhere!
@Jax: I bet it’s the Q’s, there WAS another article I saw earlier that said Q’s were wondering if they could “trust the plan”. They’re google searching for “Trump signals”, since his Twitter’s off.
Ewww. I feel dirty. Bleach the pool, Steven. 😉
@Jax: There is a link on Memeorandum, but it looks like it is some right-wing site called “BLOG-O-NEWS” of which I am utterly unfamiliar.
I am guessing I accidentally tapped into some keywords in my post title.
@June Vendetti:
Oh yeah, I’ve already ordered my Lenin linens and Mao china.
Be there, aloha.
@al Ameda: What’s the thread count on those Lenin Linen’s? Did they have good reviews? Deep pocket sheets? And what comes with the Mao China set, is it a full-service set? 😉
@Groundhog:
You may want to seek mental help if you are having thoughts of suicide. Many people project those thoughts onto abstract others before finally acting on them.
The FEMA Re-Education Camps will have lots of counselors, but if you’re having a crisis you shouldn’t wait that long.
Take care, Brother Groundhog.
@Groundhog:
Suiciding Trump supporters? Another win for liberals and fewer parasites that liberals need to support. Groundhog, you do realize that the counties that supported Joe Biden account for 70% of the nations GDP.
Yeah, wow, you might have to be polite to gay people on the street. That’s clearly going to end civilization as we know it. Wait, how do you tell if someone on the street is gay or not? Hmmm…
Are these actually mentally deranged Trumpist Traitors? Or are they Russian, Chinese or North Korean ten-centers? It says a lot that there is no way to tell the difference…
@wr: now, the one that was said to have committed suicide may have been
Having had deafening silence from the usual quarters about false claims of election fraud and everything else, this thread is something else. Can we go back to the silence and (mostly politely) squabble among ourselves about nuances and degrees of meaning?
@MarkedMan: Sadly, I think they’re actually Q’s, drawn in by the headline and lack of Trump’s twitter feed for directions.
Q’s not sending their best.
And some, we assume, are good people…
@mattbernius: definitely agree. I am a survivor
@Jax:
What if they are? Could we even tell?
@Kathy: Seriously need a ROFLMAO emoji for that one, my friend!
How did your dinner turn out out, did you find some turkey?
@CSK: hmm
and you know this how? Pelosi tell you.?
@Jax:
I expect to see a lot more Trump supporters finding sites like this one as they search the web for what they think is a good port in a storm. The problem for the Q folks and just good old fashioned regular crazy right wings nutjobs is that literally up until the past 24 hours they could hop on a site like Parler, or go to Steve Bannon’s site and just say what they wanted with no one calling them out on their BS because there was no moderation on these sites.
Any Q person or Trump supporter who finds themselves on this site will quickly discover that while Steven and James have very thick skins (the regulars on this site give them shit all the time and they almost always give as good as they get), there are still some things you can say on this great blog that will get your ass banned. Steven and James have limits to how many straight up dumb and incorrect info posts they will allow to stay up on OTB.
It will be an unpleasant surprise when they discover there is moderation on OTB.
What just happened to the Q folks and Trump supporters is that like a room full of roaches they have been forced to scatter in all directions because someone turned on a very bright light, so I will repeat myself and say they are looking for a port in a storm and are hoping they end up at a friendly port.
Hint, Q folks and Trump supporters, you may want to leave this port and look elsewhere because this is not the friendly port you are looking for.
The thing is, even if they end up at a friendly port it will be at fringe/niche sites and there ignorance is less likely to get amplified as it gets picked up by the mainstream sites like CNN, etc.. CNN was always on the hunt for something Trump or his staff said on Twitter/FB that was newsworthy so Trump’s message was amplified by CNN.
If Trump or his supporters says something outlandish on a fringe site hosted by an offshore internet firm, posting on a site that is more likely than not to give your computer herpes if you venture onto said fringe site, the odds are that most of America will never know what crazy thing was said on-line.
I know Steven and James lament that FB/Twitter/AWS are acting as judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to deciding to takedown the ability of folks like Trump to continue to take advantage of their on-line platforms, but as folks have already noted, if folks in the Government will not take action to shut down the insanity then that leaves the Tech giants. Something had to be done, as what happened on Wednesday cannot happen again, it just cannot if we want to survive as a Democracy in America.
Finally, yes….when folks who support Trump post that they lament that we will quickly become a communistic/socialist hell hole now that Trump is leaving the White House I agree that they need some new material. Whether these supporters are posting inside the U.S. or from Russia, they desperately need to get some new material.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Knowing how such tools generally work, I’ll tell you it’s trivially easy to bypass them for anyone with a little know-how, or even the right set of accidents. I’d describe it, but I’m slightly uneasy at doing so in plain view of a thread that’s under attention; it wouldn’t help anyways. The tools are usually good enough, but the nature of the internet means they can fundamentally never be perfect.
@Jax:
Yes! I found ground turkey.
@inhumans99:
I really haven’t said much about that yet, actually. The simple version is that I do not lament it. The longer answer is, well, longer 😉
@Steven L. Taylor:
I wonder if it’s something in the title–“signal from trump”–which feels like a phrase that would be on a good Q follower’s google search list.
If the site is running google analytics, it would be easy for James to investigate.
@mattbernius:
It may surprise you but I’ve given some thought over the years to PTSD. My own, specifically. I’m aware, for example, of the downstream effects of having been molested at age 11, and of feeling that my mother betrayed me pursuant to that. (My father was blameless – he was in Vietnam.) It took no great insight on my part to realize that was the point where I lost confidence in authority. Within five years I had separated from the church, dropped out of school, obtained fake ID to get a job and taken first steps into criminality.
I think my Dad got through two tours in Vietnam OK. Except for one event. He skippered an Army boat (probably an LCU) that was anchored in the Mekong. One moonless night a dark shape came up over the side. Maybe a Vietcong sapper. Maybe a kid looking to steal. My dad shot him. He had no choice, but I don’t think it set well with him, because my dad is decent down to his bones and cannot easily square the possibility that he killed a kid just looking for something to sell.
My speculation about the suicidal cop wasn’t meant as an attack, it was based on the suspicion based on personal experience that remorse and attendant fear of exposure/retribution acts more quickly on the human mind than PTSD. We can write the story one way and it’s PTSD. We can write the story another way and it’s remorse or fear of exposure. We can also write a story where he found out his wife was cheating, or one of his kids was shooting heroin. Hell, we can write the story where he never committed suicide but set up his long-lost identical twin as the body.
All of it just speculation in the absence of facts.
@Michael Reynolds:
Well, here is some more evidence. CBS News reporting
But hey, I’m just getting active professional training on this topic (including in its relationship to law enforcement and the criminal justice system), so what the heck do I know.
First Michael, thank you for sharing your personal traumas. That is a lot to work through. I respect you for your resistance.
Second, apologies for the snark in my concluding line above. Honestly, I’m admittedly having my own challenges with reading and processing info at the moment. But that doesn’t justify the snark and if the edit was working, I would have rewritten that. Jeebus, lack of edit kills me.
Admittedly, we still don’t have enough information.
However, there is one thing I do want to emphasize. This has already been a wringer of a year for just about everyone. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that to one degree or another, we’re all dealing with a base level of ongoing trauma from C19 and the fall-out. Add that to potential other factors (whether it be like you suggested “his wife leaving him” or a background medical condition like depression) and that clinically creates the space for a traumatizing event to have a greater effect. It’s those types of folks, under these types of conditions, who are more susceptible to ASD and suicidal-ideation. And we’ve just entered into the window where this becomes most serious.
So in that case, trauma can kill (or be the trigger). And that’s well documented.
Plus, we also know from clinical studies that first responders suffer from things like Acute Stress Disorder and PTSD at a significantly higher rate than the gen pop. So that’s an additional factor here.
Again, there might be a different story here. Time will tell. But for the moment, as an outsider with limited facts, I’m opting for occoms razor (especially knowing that this isn’t an isolated incident on the Capitol Police).
@mattbernius:
Fortunately I remain serenely calm, reasonable and moderate at all times, as I believe all will attest.
Dude, I think we all get a few mulligans for sheer stress. Four years of political lunacy topped off by an eternal lockdown, many with relatives sick or dying.
The weird thing is it’s actually been not awful for us. As long as our kids stay healthy. That of course is the dagger aimed at the heart of every parent. I cannot imagine why I thought that would change when they moved out.
But yeah, a wee bit of crankiness between friends? The world is falling apart. Bigger fish to fry.
@mattbernius: I hope all victims of the BLM/Antifa democrat fueled and funded riots and “peaceful” protests are able to heal properly without signs of PTSD as well. Trump snuck into office and dems bated it from before he even won because he was an outsider and still is. No matter what happens… Trump was a major stick in the spokes that woke up the sleeping democrat party and brought many sects together to win some elections in 2020. They will fall apart without the common enemy and our world will hopefully be able to come together again. The politicians created all of this hatred and dissention and I despise them for it.